The Top 10 Venture Capital Investors In The World: Midas List 2016

Jim Goetz reigns atop the Midas List in 2016. A new group of challengers are looking to close the gap.

Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, continues his run atop the list of 100 best venture investors due to his once-in-a-lifetime bet on WhatsApp. The VC spent months fighting to simply get a meeting with founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton and had to pass a battery of questions for the chance to put the first venture money into the messenger app in late 2012. Once in, he wouldn't let go. Goetz solely handled all three of the startup's funding rounds before
Facebook came calling to acquire WhatsApp for an eventual $22 billion less than two years later. That's how you turn $60 million into $3 billion and return a nearly half-billion fund six times over.

The newest challenger to Goetz represents a wholly different investing approach. Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures is Silicon Valley's one-man band that just keeps producing hits. The first investor in Instagram before it was even called that, Anderson's wins span a wide range of expertise, from enterprise (Heroku) to gaming (Machine Zone and OMGPOP), finance (Social Finance) and even fashion (Stitch Fix). His solo firm makes it easy to dispense with traditional VC convention like weekly partner meetings. "Me, myself and I have a long debate," Anderson tells Forbes.

If you can't find the next WhatsApp, a piece of Uber can do nicely instead. Billionaire Chris Sacca returns at #3 to the list in large part due to his early conviction in the ride-hailing service. His $8 million first fund is now worth nearly $2 billion at Uber's recent $62.5 billion valuation. He's joined on the list by Uber investors including Benchmark's Bill Gurley at #8,First Round Capital's Rob Hayes at #27, colleague Bill Trenchard (who made his investment while at Founder Collective alongside Eric Paley #56) debuting at #60 and later investor John Doerr #22 of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Early investments in Twitter also helped Sacca and #4 list member Peter Fenton, Gurley's Benchmark colleague, which despite its recent troubles on the public markets since its 2013 IPO still proved a golden goose for early supporters. Eight other Midas Listers appear on the list in large part due to Twitter, led by early investor Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital at #66.

Top 10 staple Josh Kopelman appears on the list at #6 on the strength of an early commitment to LinkedIn and a slew of other hits. He's joined by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, an investor at Greylock Partners, at #18.

Mary Meeker, this list's #5 and the highest-ranking woman ever on the Midas List, represents still another breed of tech investing success. A former start Wall Street analyst, Meeker bets relatively late—and usually gets it right. Her investments in Facebook, Chinese e-commerce site JD.com, Airbnb and Spotify have made Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' digital growth team one of the strongest in the Valley, with potentially more to come through newer investments including Houzz, Instacart, Slack and even a sock company, Stance. (Three more investors appear due to Facebook overall.)

They're all joined in the top 10 by three more billionaire investors, Sequoia's Neil Shen and Doug Leone and Founders Fund's Peter Thiel. This year's list has 10 billionaires in all, six of them reaching the nine zeroes club by their startup investments.

The top firms of the Midas List in 2016 start with Sequoia Capital. While Sequoia recently lost a partner to a scandal involving ongoing litigation, the firms's remaining partners kept a stranglehold on the top 10 with three members, and nine overall, still one less than in 2015. They were followed by Accel Partners, which had two fewer partners than 2015 with six. Four firms had four partners: Andreessen Horowitz, which added Peter Levine #83, Benchmark, which returned its four longest-tenured partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Greylock Partners.

Healthcare and biotech investors appear in force on this year's list, with Rob Nelsen of ARCH Venture Partners returning to the list at #16 through companies working on everything from double chin treatments to a common blood test for most cancers. Carl Gordon of OrbiMed joins him at the back the top #20. And regardless of what's happening in its public markets, China is still home to some of the highest-valued companies in tech. Thirteen of this year's Midas List invest heavily in the country, from the multi-culturally minded investor Hans Tung #21 of GGV Capital and his colleague Jenny Lee #40 to billionaire Yuri Milner#17.

As in 2015, venture capital's biggest returns continue to be concentrated with male investors. five women appear on this year's Midas List, with one investor dropping out of the top 100 and another, Theresia Gouw, returning at #92 as she co-leads her own new firm, Aspect Ventures.

Methodology:

With hundreds of funds considered across even more partners, it's never been tougher to crack the Midas List. Forbes and TrueBridge Capital Partners collect data from publicly available sources as well as through many direct submissions from the firms themselves. Midas provides a five-year look-back at a partner's portfolio, with exits by IPO or acquisition of $200 million or more and private holdings that raised money at valuations of $400 million or more over that time period (with a discount for the unrealized return). Midas' formula favors earlier, bigger bets that return high multiples on an investor's initial money, though a string of later successes can still make a Midas portfolio. (More information can be found at our submission page for Midas here.)

For 2016, the average top 10 list members had 13 such companies to their name; the last 10 members had an average of 8. The top 10 of the list invested in an average of 8 companies valued at $1 billion or more, compared to three for the last 10 spots.